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Help name our new boat

Wow – we did it! Together, we’ve bought ‘The People’s Boat’. Almost 1,000 people chipped in and together we have bought the boat that’s going to confront the Amazon Warrior – AKA, The Beast.

Now we need you to give it a name. It’s only fitting that a crowdfunded boat gets a crowdsourced name!

We need a name that reflects its people-powered spirit, its New Zealand heritage, and its new role as a guardian of our oceans and coastlines. It’s a humble 15 metre ex-pilot boat with 7 berths and gets along at a fair rate of knots. It’s not flashy, but it’s seaworthy and safe.

Click here to suggest a name. Once everyone has submitted their suggestions, we’ll pick out a shortlist, and then ask you to vote on the final choice.

We’re preparing a crew, and soon we’ll be cleaning the bilges, stocking the galley and making it look like a Greenpeace boat!

Thanks to you, our movement is growing stronger by the day. This boat will represent all of us when it meets The Beast. It’s a people-powered boat and a powerful statement from the people of New Zealand. The oil giants will know who and what it represents and that makes it all the more effective. It shows what we can do when we stand together.

It’s the boat that’s going to take our protest from land out to sea where Statoil and Chevron are blasting the ocean floor every 8 seconds every day, all day – traumatising whales and dolphins – searching for oil that would take us past a climate tipping point.

The People’s Boat represents all of us who want to rise up and end the oil age. It’s a powerful symbol of resistance and it shows what we can do when we work together. This really gives me hope.

This is not the time to sit on the sidelines. This is a climate emergency. The oil majors are going to extreme ends to get more oil to burn. If we’re to avert disaster, we need all hands on deck. We need to confront the oil industry and we need to do it together.

For us to have a future, the oil industry must have no future.

We’ll be protesting at the oil industry conference in Taranaki next week. And now we can take them on at sea too, with a boat, funded and named by the people of New Zealand.

Almost a thousand of you stepped up to help us buy the boat when we needed you to. Now it needs a name to reflect the people power that drives it!